Miscellany
Oct. 21st, 2005 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowBroke 185 this morning. Fifteen down, twenty-five to go.
I'm not making much headway on reading; I'm still working on Abstract Harmonic Analysis and The Small House at Allington. This has been a slow year for me; I only finished two books in April, and it's looking about the same this month. I'm on track to read about 75 books this year, down from (if I recall correctly) about 90 last year. I've just been kind of lethargic all year.
I just got another Amazon package. Contents: three F/SF (Kirstein's The Lost Steersman, Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, and Brust's Sethra Lavode); two other fiction (Bellow's Herzog, and Gillian Bradshaw's Island of Ghosts: A Novel of Roman Britain); three histories (Lucie Aubrac's Outwitting the Gestapo, H. W. Brands' The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s, and James Chace's 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs); plus Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and a couple of CDs (Bonnie Raitt, Luck of the Draw, and The Mamas & The Papas, Gold). I'll probably start in on the Fforde or the Kirstein promptly; maybe that'll break me out of my (reading) funk. The TM&TP album looks good; it doesn't have "Make Your Own Kind of Music", but it does have most of their other hits, plus a number of songs I don't recognize. The Raitt is there as part of my continued expansion of my country collection. (I just hope neither album has that new anti-copying tech on it; I do want to put them on my computer.)
Sigh. There's a pile of calculus midterms in my briefcase, waiting to be graded. My geometry students unanimously voted for another take-home midterm, so I'll have to compose that soon. Lack of energy... (Except in class. When I'm in front of a crowd of students, I get a charge of adrenaline, no matter how tired I might be. It's the outside-of-class stuff that drags, especially grading-related things.)
It's looking like I'll only have one Senior Assignment student finish this semester; there are three or four others who expect to finish up next semester, and I've just gotten a request to supervise another. I'm not sure about that one; she wants to do a project in graph theory, and there are a couple of other faculty who'd be better for that. I've already referred one student (also wanting to work in graph theory) to them. But I'll meet with her and see just what she wants.
I finished up with Buffy, and I'm now watching the first-season DVDs of Everwood. There are still three episodes of that show that I've never seen. (Make that four. Last night, I had the VCR set to tape it, and there was a tape in the machine - but I hadn't rewound it, so only the first 36 seconds of the episode made it to tape. Sigh, again.)
Too sluggish to be interesting today. Sorry.
I'm not making much headway on reading; I'm still working on Abstract Harmonic Analysis and The Small House at Allington. This has been a slow year for me; I only finished two books in April, and it's looking about the same this month. I'm on track to read about 75 books this year, down from (if I recall correctly) about 90 last year. I've just been kind of lethargic all year.
I just got another Amazon package. Contents: three F/SF (Kirstein's The Lost Steersman, Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, and Brust's Sethra Lavode); two other fiction (Bellow's Herzog, and Gillian Bradshaw's Island of Ghosts: A Novel of Roman Britain); three histories (Lucie Aubrac's Outwitting the Gestapo, H. W. Brands' The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s, and James Chace's 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs); plus Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and a couple of CDs (Bonnie Raitt, Luck of the Draw, and The Mamas & The Papas, Gold). I'll probably start in on the Fforde or the Kirstein promptly; maybe that'll break me out of my (reading) funk. The TM&TP album looks good; it doesn't have "Make Your Own Kind of Music", but it does have most of their other hits, plus a number of songs I don't recognize. The Raitt is there as part of my continued expansion of my country collection. (I just hope neither album has that new anti-copying tech on it; I do want to put them on my computer.)
Sigh. There's a pile of calculus midterms in my briefcase, waiting to be graded. My geometry students unanimously voted for another take-home midterm, so I'll have to compose that soon. Lack of energy... (Except in class. When I'm in front of a crowd of students, I get a charge of adrenaline, no matter how tired I might be. It's the outside-of-class stuff that drags, especially grading-related things.)
It's looking like I'll only have one Senior Assignment student finish this semester; there are three or four others who expect to finish up next semester, and I've just gotten a request to supervise another. I'm not sure about that one; she wants to do a project in graph theory, and there are a couple of other faculty who'd be better for that. I've already referred one student (also wanting to work in graph theory) to them. But I'll meet with her and see just what she wants.
I finished up with Buffy, and I'm now watching the first-season DVDs of Everwood. There are still three episodes of that show that I've never seen. (Make that four. Last night, I had the VCR set to tape it, and there was a tape in the machine - but I hadn't rewound it, so only the first 36 seconds of the episode made it to tape. Sigh, again.)
Too sluggish to be interesting today. Sorry.
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-22 04:00 am (UTC)Just got all three of Brust's V of A in PB. I think you'll enjoy Sethra Lavode. (I had read them before in HB from the Library - I prefer to collect PB - more books/unit volume).
Bryson is great for historical background. A few annoying numerical mistakes, but that isn't the book one would consult for that, anyway. I think you'll like it. I also very much like TM&TP. The rest of your list, I don't think I know much about. I have to expand.
Never could get enthusiastic about Buffy. Am trying to get into Firefly now, because of all of the hype from people whose opinions I respect, but am still having trouble. Interesting characters, but cliched situations. I expect I would have loved it 40 years ago. Both of them.
I enjoyed this post. Please be sluggish again some time :<) . .
no subject
Date: 2005-10-22 10:14 pm (UTC)